Eastern and northern Europe

North of the Ottoman Empire, several Christian dynasties also built up their power
and worked toward creating stronger states. Like Aragon and Castile, the crowns of
Poland and Lithuania were joined together by a marriage, though this one also involved
a conversion – in 1386, Queen Jadwiga of Poland married Jagaila (Jagiello in
Polish), the pagan grand duke of Lithuania, who was baptized with the Christian name
of Wladyslaw and promised to convert his subjects to Christianity. Each country remained
largely self-governing, and under the Jagiellonian dynasty Poland-Lithuania
expanded its territory to cover a large part of central and eastern Europe, including
what is now Belarus and Ukraine. In 1493, the fi rst national parliament (the Sejm ,
pronounced like “same” in English) was established in Poland, and in 1569 Poland and
Lithuania were united under a single parliament. Nobles dominated this parliament,
however, and when the last Jagiellonian monarch died in 1572, they asserted their right
to be consulted on foreign policy matters and to elect the kings. They often chose
foreigners without local bases of power rather than elevating a native noble family
to the monarchy. Poland-Lithuania defeated the Teutonic Knights and their allies the
Livonian Brethren of the Sword, military religious orders who together controlled
much of the Baltic region, several times during the fi fteenth century. This halted the
advance of Germans eastward, which had begun in the fourteenth century under the
protection of the Teutonic Knights. In 1525, the Teutonic Knights themselves underwent
a conversion, when their last Grand Master, Albert of Brandenburg, a member
of the Hohenzollern family, became a Lutheran. Albert changed their territory from
a religious state to the secular duchy of Prussia, under the overlordship of the king of
Poland-Lithuania.
To the east of Poland-Lithuania, the decline in the power of the Mongols in the
late fourteenth century allowed the grand dukes of Muscovy to expand their holdings.
During the fi fteenth century, the grand dukes Basil I (ruled 1389–1425) and Basil II
(ruled 1425–62) fi rmed up their alliance with the eastern Christian church and rewarded
high-ranking landowners (boyars) with positions as army offi cers and government
offi cials. Ivan III (ruled 1462–1505) married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor,
thus both symbolically and genealogically tying himself to the legacy of Rome. Church
and court offi cials began to talk of Moscow as the “third Rome,” and Ivan’s grandson
Ivan IV (called “the Terrible,” ruled 1533–84) gave himself the title of caesar (“tsar” in
Russian) in 1547 to further reinforce this link. Ivan IV was even more effective than
French or Spanish monarchs at curbing the independent power of the great nobles.
Using a special police force, he ordered the arrest and murder of hundreds of aristocrats
and gave his victims’ estates as payment to those landowners – usually members
of the lesser nobility – serving in his army or government, often referred to as the
“service nobility” and thus similar to the French noblesse de robe . Ivan III and Ivan IV
expanded Muscovite territory both westward and eastward, annexing several cities,
including Novgorod, whose inhabitants were massacred. They attacked Livonia, and
seized Tatar states east of the Ural Mountains in order to control access to the Caspian
Sea. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch, came under the direct
control of the tsar.
Northern Europe also saw a series of confl icts between rulers and the nobility in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, set against a backdrop of moves by German cities
who had joined together to form the Hanseatic League to gain monopoly control of
the fur and fi sh trade. In 1388, Swedish nobles turned to Queen Margrete of Denmark,
the widow of King Haakon VI of Norway, for help in opposing the Germans. Their
combined efforts were successful, and in 1397 a treaty set up the Union of Kalmar
uniting Denmark, Norway, and Sweden under Margrete. The treaty provided for a
common foreign policy, but separate national councils and the continuation of existing
laws in each country. Both Denmark–Norway and Sweden (which included what
is now Finland) developed representative assemblies ( Riksdag ), with lawmaking and
taxation powers. The Swedish Riksdag was unique, because along with the usual estates
of clergy, nobility, and bourgeois, it had a fourth estate for peasants.
During the early sixteenth century, Swedish nobles became increasingly dissatisfi ed
with the Union of Kalmar, and after several years of war, in 1523 the Swedes defeated the
Danes and established their own monarchy under Gustav Vasa, a member of a prominent
Swedish noble family. Like his contemporaries Francis I of France and Henry
VIII of England, Gustavus Vasa (ruled 1523–60) centralized his administration and increased
royal power over the nobility and the church. He built an extremely effi cient
army and navy, both of them used frequently over the next century and a half. Hostilities
and alliances among northern European powers shifted constantly, with the Danes
and Swedes sometimes united – against the German city of Lübeck, and later against
Emperor Charles V – and sometimes fi ghting against each other, as in the Northern
War (1563–70), which involved major naval battles fought by specialized battleships
and ultimately ended in Danish defeat. The Danish and Swedish royal houses were
frequently linked by marriage to those of the rest of Europe – the Danish King Christian
II married the sister of the Emperor Charles V, the brother of the king of Sweden
married the daughter of the king of Poland–Lithuania – so that northern confl icts were
often supported by money and troops coming from elsewhere.ñêà÷àòü dle 12.1